A further element of consolidation in the data management occurred when Oracle purchased Datanomic, a data quality company based in Cambridge (for a change, the original one in England rather than the one near Boston). Datanomic has been an interesting story, set up in 2001 and bringing to the market a well-rounded data quality product. This is a crowded market, and in the dreadful conditions for enterprise software that occurred after the market crash in 2001 the company initially struggled. There were, after all, an awful lot of data quality products out there that people had already heard of. Then Datanomic did a very smart thing and re-positioned itself to focus on a business rather than a technical issue: compliance, especially in financial services.

This turned out to be an inspired change of marketing strategy, and the company went from layoffs to hiring again, growing rapidly over the last three years, far in excess of the 9% annual rise in the general data quality market that has been seen recently. Datanomic has had positive customer references in our regular annual surveys, and it seems to me a well-architected solution. From Oracle’s point of view, this complements their purchase of Silver Creek, which was a specialist product data quality tool. These two acquisitions suggest that Oracle is changing its view of data quality – previously they relied on partner arrangements with companies such as Trillium for their data quality solution. Now it would appear that they see data quality as a more integral issue. The price of the deal was not disclosed, but given Datanomic’s rapid recent growth, it will have doubtless been at a healthy premium.